The Sales Enabler - Jeff Ernst - Sales Enablement Best Practices

How to create a sales playbook in four easy steps

The first questions I always get from my clients when I talk about why they should create sales playbooks is, "How do we go about creating playbooks, and who does it?"  This is not surprising, given that most companies have cut way back on their sales support staff this year.

The key is to keep it simple and base it on what's proven to work.  Here's a simple four step process that I always use.

1.  Assess ::
You start by identifying recurring selling situations where you want to drive repeatable behavior. If you find your team competing in 80 deals a quarter selling a particular product line to CIOs in the manufacturing industry, that situation is a good candidate for a playbook.

Once you’ve identified the situation, profile winning sales engagements by interviewing your top reps to find out things like:

• What were the buyer’s information needs at each stage of their problem-solving process?
• What tools and materials did the reps use and when?
• What objections did they have to overcome?
• What experts did the rep bring in to help work the deal, and what role did they play?

Look for the patterns across multiple sales engagements, and then align these with your sales cycle or sales process.  Don't believe the statement you may hear that "each of our top sales people does things very differently."  Remember, sales is like any other business process, in that the only way to scale it is to drive repeatability.

2. Build ::
Organize the content, tools, and resources you identified in the Assess stage into playbook activities. Identify gaps where new information needs to be created and assign ownership for filling the gaps. Surround the playbook activities with coaching tips that help the reps know how to perform the activities.

3. Launch ::
Roll out the sales playbooks to the sales team. Start with a pilot group to get feedback. Make sure there are well-respected sales professionals who are opinion leaders in that pilot group. Expand usage to the larger team with the support of sales management, marketing and the opinion leaders in sales.  As you roll it out, make sure everyone knows which top performers were interviewed to gather the best practices for the playbook, because every middle-of-the-pack rep is always wanting to know what the superstars are doing so they can do it too.

4. Evolve ::
Playbooks should be living, breathing creatures. Monitor usage and measure the impact. And use these metrics to optimize the playbooks over time. You will find opportunities to:

• Refine the activities, content and messaging within the playbooks
• Eliminate the choke points in your sales process
• Keep deals from going off track
• Develop new sales playbooks

If it takes you more than a week to create a playbook, then you're likely overthinking it and making it too complicated.  You're better off focusing on the 10-15 things or activities that really matter in a sales cycle, rather than overloading the playbook with everything a rep may ever need.

And don't forget to check out the guide on How to Create Killer Sales Playbooks for more details and best practices. 

Sales methodologies alone are not enough

In my last post, I talked about how Proven Plays are better than More Methodologies.  Why is this?

If you look at sales performance across a sales team, it almost always forms a bell curve. The top ten percent are the star performers. These are the folks who can sell blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs. We all want more of these stars, so we spend millions of dollars sending people to sales training where we parade our product experts, methodology gurus, and motivational speakers in front of the team—all with the hope that methodology and training will give our reps the knowledge, skills, attitude, and structure to become stars.

But it doesn’t work. Studies show that the average salesperson forgets more than 80 percent of what they learn in sales training within 30 days. The rep gets back to the office, puts the training binder on the shelf, reverts to old habits, and continues to follow the path of least resistance rather than adhere to your sales process.

What do they remember from your high-priced sales meetings? They remember the stories they heard your best reps telling at the bar about deals they won. They remember Paul, showing pictures of his new vacation home, telling everyone what he did at Big Whale Financial to eliminate the competition within the first two weeks and bring in the contract with no price discounting. Rather than paying attention to the training, the junior reps are thinking “If I just do what Paul does, I’ll be able to buy a vacation home too.”

I’m not knocking methodologies. They certainly have their place in providing structure to the sales process. The reason they often fail is that companies don’t give salespeople the guidance to put them into practice. A methodology or process tells you why to do something, but it doesn’t tell you what to do in a specific situation, when to do it, or how to do it.

And no amount of training is going to enable a sales rep to be ready to handle every selling situations he or she will encounter. What a rep needs to know to do solution selling exceeds what any one person can retain in their head.

Stop trying to turn every “B” and “C” player into an “A” player and instead focus on shifting the whole performance curve a few points to the right. The real opportunity is in the middle 80 percent of performers.

• What if you could help each of these reps be more effective and close two or three more deals a year from working the same number of opportunities? That would cause a significant increase in revenue across the company.

• What if you can make each rep more efficient by taking away some of the time-wasting activities they’re doing today, enabling them to work three or four more opportunities in a year? The effect is like an investment (in a good economy)—it multiplies.

Salespeople are just-in-time, opportunity-specific learners, so they need just-in-time, opportunity-specific knowledge. This knowledge is best delivered to sales teams as dynamic coaching, in the form of repeatable sales playbooks. You can shift the performance curve by bottling up the plays that are proven to work for people like Connie and putting them in the hands of reps like Mark.

The New Rules of Sales Enablement: 3. Proven Plays

Connie is a top salesperson at one of my client companies. Like most other stars, one thing that separates Connie from the pack is that she’ll never wing it. Whenever she’s in a particular selling situation, she does the same set of things that helped her win similar deals in the past.

When something stops working, she finds an alternative and sticks with it as long as it keeps working. You might say that Connie has a set of repeatable playbooks in her head. These playbooks have been developed and adapted through her four years of experience in front of customers.

Mark sells the same products as Connie. He is a career middle-of-the-packer, always near or at quota, but never hitting it out of the park. Mark just sort of makes it up for each deal as he goes along. Sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn’t. Mark believes he would be so much more successful if he just got more at-bats. The problem is he can’t swing the bat like Connie. So giving him more at bats won’t improve his batting average.

Connie and Mark’s boss thinks he has a solution. He is planning to roll out a new sales methodology at the next sales meeting, believing that this is the missing link to improving sales performance. Think again.

A methodology alone won't get Mark to hit a split-fingered fastball.

OLD RULE: If we implement a new sales methodology, every salesperson will become an "A" player.

NEW RULE: Any salesperson can improve performance by following sales playbooks that are proven to work in winning deals.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a sales methodology or process is essential, but in my experience, they usually don’t have the impact they could because salespeople don’t have a practical way to follow them.  I'll talk about why sales methodologies alone are not enough in my next post.